“Covid kills. Prisons are concentration camps for the poor “: rally for the release of all prisoners in Philadelphia on November 28th
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In the SCI Mahanoy State Prison in Frackville, Pennsylvania, as in many other prisons in the USA, prisoners are isolated under a strict lockdown due to the corona pandemic. The US civil rights activist and journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal cannot publish a current column at this point because the political prisoner has been in quarantine in one of the eleven “Housing Units” of the SCI Mahanoy since around mid-December 2020. On December 23, the Department of Corrections (DOC), Pennsylvania’s central prison authority, placed the affected tracts on a “list of extended quarantine measures” and tightened the isolation. This means that there are no longer any visit conversations on video monitors. “The Covid-19 cases are at an all-time high,” added the DOC to the general alert from the Governor of Pennsylvania. It is now “more important than ever to wear a mask and keep your distance.”
Individual departments of the SCI Mahanoy had been isolated gradually since November because prisoners had been infected with the corona virus in the second wave of pandemics. On November 25, 2020, Pennsylvania’s transmitter had WFMZ reports that the SCI Mahanoy has “confirmed his first Covid-19 death”. A 33-year-old prisoner who was serving a sentence of five to ten years died and “infected a total of one hundred inmates and forty servants.” The prisoner was “the 26th inmate to die of Covid-19 in Pennsylvania’s state prisons.”
The daily newspaper reported in the first week of December Philadelphia Inquirerthat in Pennsylvania “at least 2,300 inmates have been diagnosed with the virus since the end of October,” 150 of them in the cells of Philadelphia’s state prisons and an additional 242 inmates in the federal prison there. The city government then canceled all court dates and imposed a shutdown on the entire judiciary. The Inquirer criticized that, unlike in California, Massachusetts, Michigan and North Carolina, in Pennsylvania’s state prisons, corona tests for law enforcement officers who deal with the incarcerated on a daily basis are not mandatory, as the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention make it mandatory. Pennsylvania doesn’t even offer them for voluntary participation. In Philadelphia, both inmates ‘legal aid groups and the correctional workers’ union are calling for tests for everyone.
In line with the increasingly tense situation in Pennsylvania’s prisons, DOC boss John Wetzel had to admit infection figures on December 10th, “well above the high from spring.” That is why he had instructed all institutions to only allow encounters “no more than eight people” until Christmas and to only allow visits indirectly via the monitor stations set up in the institution. Mail was limited to twelve standard letters per month and the right to telephone was suspended.
The management of the SCI Mahanoy has so far not been able to find out more about the tightening that has since been imposed, or how Abu-Jamal is affected by it. What is certain is that by Christmas the infection situation in the Pennsylvania prison system escalated to such an extent that the new lockdown measures are to be maintained at least into January, analogous to the massive increase in infections in the general population.
The Berlin Free Mumia alliance had already announced before the holidays that it was unclear whether Mumia Abu-Jamal would “give his speech on fascist tendencies in the USA” on January 9, 2021 at the 26th International Rosa Luxemburg Conference as in the previous years would speak in his own voice, “because he is currently barely able to communicate to the outside due to the cell lockdown”. However, since he had already sent his speech to Berlin in writing, it would be read out in the livestream of the conference and Abu-Jamal would definitely take part again.
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